WebConnoisseur

When you have major game-changing news or work for an incredibly popular company, having relationships with the press is easy. For the rest of us, there’s a right way and a wrong way to establish a relationship with the press.

Before I jump into techniques, I want to talk about tools. The good news is that web technology has opened up doors for any company, no matter how small, to establish a relationship with the press. Not only can you find the right journalist, but you can have a discussion and at the time when the journalist is most open to your expertise. In particular, there are two places you should certainly utilize to take advantage of press opportunities.

Using Twitter & LinkedIn for Press

Twitter is great for establishing a relationship with the press. Most journalists display their Twitter account on their publication. For example, the NY Times has a full page dedicated to their staff Twitter accounts. By performing simple and Advanced Twitter Searches, you can identify members of the press who are trying to solve a problem or want information for an upcoming column.

Below is a search I did on Twitter a while back where I used the terms “is about column next”. Take a look how powerful a search like this can be:

LinkedIn is a searchable Rolodex that not only helps you find journalists to reach out to, but shows you one’s in your network, meaning journalists that a friend of yours can introduce you to. Take a look at the advanced search I did for job title=”editor”:

Establishing a Relationship

Besides performing smart searches, how do you actually establish a relationship with the press? It is fairly simple. Take a look at the pictures on the right.

One shows someone shouting. This is the default method that most people try to employ. The shout method. They are so excited about their own product, they forget that by default, most people aren’t. You can’t just beat the press over the head with your product. Hence, why you need to establish a relationship.

Instead, show the journalist the path that leads back to you. For example, if you sell organic beer, instead of shouting “we are one of only 3 companies selling organic beer in the U.S.,” establish a relationship by reaching out to them about their latest organic coffee story. You might mention:

“Thank you for the deep coverage of the organic coffee industry. I work in the organic beer industry and find the challenges are much the same. The one difference is that organic coffee beans are usually grown in 3rd world countries, whereas organic grain is usually obtained locally. The battle for organic beer brewers isn’t about preserving rain-forests or dealing with foreign governments, its about convincing local farmers to produce grain that can be certified organic.”

Hopefully you may have inspired a new article about organic beer brewing. Even if you didn’t, you might find yourself as a source on their upcoming article on local farmers.

Another great way to establish a relationship is to meet them in person. If you know they will be at an event or conference, try to attend and join in on a conversation with them (avoid talking about your company). Then, later on, when you message them, you can remind them where you first met.

Benefits of Establishing a Relationship With the Press

Besides an increased chance of getting coverage, investing in a relationship with the press has these benefits:

• Repeat coverage – you’ll have a far greater likelyhood of obtaining press more then once
• Direct contact to fix links in the article or add in missing links (very important for SEO)
• Relationship extends beyond current publication – journalists may change jobs or companies, but you’ll still be connected.

If this kind of soft marketing isn’t your forte, consider hiring someone who has had success obtaining press with little to no budget, or hire someone with an editorial background as they’ll know exactly what a good and bad pitch looks like.

In the SEO community, there’s been debates as to whether you should bother using search engine webmaster tools. Thanks to the latest set of data Google is providing, there is more reason then ever before to create a webmaster tools account for your sites.

On the positive side of having an account were points like these:

• Ability to verify ownership – sites willing to verify might be more trusted in the eyes of engines
• Direct messaging & data from the search engines – the data to date hasn’t been very impressive & messaging typically only occurs if you’ve been hacked
• Help identifying issues – learn about crawl errors, robots.txt issues.
• Ability to submit things like sitemaps, canonical preferences, or report spam or malware.

On the negative side of having an account were things like:

• Giving the engines too much information – personal emails, IP, site network, etc.
• Most sites don’t register, and if you are properly optimized & crawlable there isn’t much reason to
• The information provided was far from spectacular, so why bother.

Thanks to the new types of data Google is sharing, visiting the webmaster tool area is worthwhile. Now you can look at things like:

• Natural search impressions
• Natural search clicks & ranking data, including breakdowns by rank and the pages that rank, plus sortable data
• Greater number of incoming links reported
• Site crawl speed.

The ranking & impression data I find the most interesting. I’ve long used analytics tools to pull out the page 2 queries, for example, but having exact ranking, impression and click through data helps webmasters better understand areas to make improvements, the meaning of dropping from a #1 ranking to a #2, how much personalized & geographical search components might affect ranking, and the wide variety of rankings & words any one page can have. It would be nice to see the data be more specific & reliable (right now clicks of less then 10 during the reporting period leave us with essentially no data).

Preferabbly, all the new data shared in Webmaster tools would be included directly into Google Analytics, but I’m happy to see the new data & hope they continue to expand the data set. Nice work Google Webmaster Tools team!

SEOs have long been preaching the importance of anchor text in links and have long pointed out LinkedIn as a great place to gain keyword-rich links. Hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn users have followed this great advice, but something changed late last year that no one else seemed to notice.

Note from Dustin: This SEO tip is a reward for those following my blog. I’ve kept this one secret since late last year so I could share it at Searchfest during my talk on Reputation Management earlier this month. I’m sharing it here as a reward for people who have been following me, but will not be actively promoting this tip as I don’t want it to be discovered by too many people, causing LinkedIn or Google to make changes.

Again, SEOs, including myself, have long been preaching that the links you share in your LinkedIn profile should use custom anchor text so instead of the link saying “My Website” or one of the other generic terms, it could pass along a keyword-rich link. For example, my link to this site said something like “Dustin’s SEO Blog” so I was at least giving Google or other engines a better indication to what the site is about–something that is deemed very important in their algorithms.

Well, my advice has changed. Why? Turns out LinkedIn went the way of Twitter & other popular UGC sites and no-followed all the links. Let me say that again, in case you missed it: LinkedIn links no longer count in the eyes of search engines!

This is unfortunate as I believe those links should count. There’s no need for LinkedIn to hoard their link juice and the links are limited, transparent, and attached to real people with real business networks. It also gives spiders a chance to discover small sites it may not discover otherwise. I’m not familiar with search spammers using LinkedIn to game the search engines, but I suppose it may have happened enough for Google to pressure LinkedIn. For those who link to their LinkedIn profiles a lot, the fact that LinkedIn is not linking back to your site (even though you specifically tell it to do so) might be enough reason for you to reconsider.

After some tinkering, I discovered there is a way to get followed links from LinkedIn. Here’s what you need to do:

Go into your LinkedIn profile and edit the links section. Your choices in the drop down should look like this:

You’ll notice that I highlighted “My Website” and “My Blog.” If you choose one of those two, you will get a followed link from LinkedIn. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to customize the text as you can with the “Other” choice, but at least the links will count.

If you are a person who has a lot of different sites, I’d recommend using both My Website and My Blog & using one of the other choices as you prefer (knowing you won’t get link love). Take a look at my profile for an example: Dustin Woodard on LinkedIn. And if you haven’t already done so, you should be using a custom URL (see settings – I used “woodard” so my link is http://www.linkedin.com/in/woodard instead of some random number).

There you go, a free SEO tip of great value to pretty much anyone on the web.

Searchfest Photo credit: seandreilinger

To better explain Wired magazine’s reference to mike siwek lawyer mi searches, I created this experimental blog post. Wired’s excellent article on Google’s algorithm links off to the search phrase: “mike siwek lawyer mi”, which sends you off to Google’s search results page for that query.

The mike siwek search phrase was used as an example of how Google is superior to Bing. Here’s what wired wrote:

The top result connects to a listing for an attorney named Michael Siwek in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a fairly innocuous search — the kind that Google’s servers handle billions of times a day — but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, there’s no direct referral to Siwek.

The ironic part is that everyone who is reading the article gets a Google search page that is in no way superior to the Bing because the results have been flooded with coverage of the newly popular search.

Take a look at the current Top 10 Results for a “mike siwek lawyer mi” Google search:

• Mike Siwek Lawyer Mi – What’s Hot (a result from Alexa.com hot urls)
• Mike Siwek, Lawyer from Michigan, shows how Google dominates … (a blog post)
• Mike Siwek, Lawyer from Michigan, shows how Google dominates (tweet meme for the blog post)
• Siwek, Michael E. Attorney in Grand Rapids, Michigan MI (a crumby US Lawyers DB listing)
• Mike Siwek Lawyer MI – Google Search Theory Torn Apart (another blog post)
• Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine (the actual Wired Article this post is about)
• google | Tumblr (a tumblr page that links to the Wired article)
• High-Tech PR Blog >> Beyond the Hype: How Google works (a PR company blog post summary of the Wired article)
• New Michigan law mandates safer cigarettes, but smokers complain (a newspaper article that quotes the Mike Siwek, the actual Michigan lawyer this whole query is about, but no way to contact Mike)
• How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | B12 Solipsism (another blog post)

Of course, this isn’t fair to Google as the results when Steven Levy was writing the article were probably completely different. However, you would expect Mike Siwek’s site to show up shortly past the media mentions. Not so. Mike’s official law practice site didn’t show up until result 110 on page 11 of Google’s search results–a place where few searchers would dare take the time to navigate to and if they did find it, the listing description doesn’t even mention Mike Siwek, so it probably wouldn’t get clicked on:

The fact that this listing is so buried leads me to believe the search engine result that Google’s engineers were so proud of was result 4 that I list above, which is simply an address database site that is borderline spam and riddled with Google ads.

I count 28 different Google adsense ad listings if you include the next ads arrow tabbing, or 11 without the tabbing. No wonder Bing didn’t want to list this page! The only thing that is slightly impressive about this search is that Google thought to replace Mike Siwek with Michael Siwek.

I don’t mean to beat up on Google too much. I could certainly come up with many examples where Google’s algorithm is superior to Bing, but as an SEO consultant who is paid to constantly monitor the ugly flaws of search engine algorithms, I find this example of “Google’s algorithmic dominance” humorous & worry about the simple mindedness of Google’s top engineers when it comes to evaluating improvements in their algorithm.

Something recently reminded me of an event early in my web marketing and SEO career. For me, it was a very pivotal moment of my career; for you, it might be an entertaining story of a consulting douche bag and how SEO battles don’t change much.

Roll back the clock to a little over a decade ago when cell phones were bricks generally seen only in movies and Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999″ was forward-looking. I graduated from the University of Washington with a couple finance-related degrees and began working for, surprise, a financial company. After quickly proving that my abilities went beyond filling out paperwork for clients and managing portfolios, I spent my time on “special projects”, which included things like investing research, Y2K compliance, & building our web presence.

I quickly discovered the importance of search engines and was quite successful at driving leads & press to the site & company. In 2001, I had increased their assets by over $50 million, was named “Best of the Web” by Forbes three times, and was even selected by Inc Magazine as the best marketer of the year using techniques that have changed little to this day (but now have names). How was this success rewarded? They brought in a consultant.

My boss’s friend was unemployed after his start-up went belly up. I won’t name him, but will describe him. He looked very much like the Comic Guy on the Simpsons – he was large, sported a red goatee, and a greased back pony tail. His previous occupation was as a conservative radio talk show host (seriously – I’m not kidding) and as you can imagine, he was a talker. He loved buzz words, though a true understanding of them was of little importance. And now he was a consultant.

Things seemed a little backwards. If you looked at our resume’s & track records at the time, you would have guessed I was consulting for him. Considering it was my boss’s friend and upper management was wowed by the fancy words and whiteboard drawing, who was I to question the new relationship?

To this day, I can’t recall a single person I couldn’t work with–other then this guy. He was a bully and I was his young prey. His big idea was to change our various sites to a single flash site. When I warned him that search engines have trouble with Flash, his response was that “no one uses search engines to find websites.” Apparently countless web analytics reports showing all our traffic sources wasn’t enough for him, nor was an export of our client referral source records, nor the daily stories of new clients who found us via a specific search query. Facts meant little to this talk show host, unless the facts or half-truths supported his cause. After much back and forth, it was clear that it was his way or the highway.

I decided to take a very large risk (especially considering this was during the dot-com crash & a troubling time for the stock market) – I crafted an email to the President and Vice-president of the company explaining that the direction we were heading in was going to hurt us and that I was ready to leave the company if they continued to use his “services.” Clearly my boss would want to fire me for going over his head and making him look bad, but it was a risk I had to take to restore my sanity and keep the company from driving directly into the brick wall in which it was undoubtedly headed.

The story does have a happy ending. They did get rid of him and I used the existing sites to raise another $200 million (doubling the 20-year old company’s assets) before I left a couple years later to take my boss’s job at a larger company. The irony is that I am now a full-time consultant and he became an anti-consultant evangelist.

From that point on in my career, I decided I would never stay silent when I saw the company I worked for start to take a wrong turn, even if it meant losing my job because I wouldn’t want to work for a company that ignored evidence and experience anyways.

When you share a link on Facebook the summary text (or snippet) is usually displayed with the link. Sometimes they work well, other times they are completely random. Learn how to control exactly what shows up when a Facebook user shares a link.

Here’s an example of a link I recently shared that didn’t have ideal summary or snippet text:

I wondered why it was such a poor summary, then I learned that Facebook uses the page’s meta description (same thing used by the search engines in displaying your page). The Webby Awards has no meta description, so Facebook tried to find the next best choice, which was the first paragraph in the code following the H1 tag.

As the user sharing the link, I can actually click on the provided summary text and alter it to whatever I like:

The problem is, most Facebook users don’t realize they can change it, or are too lazy to. Plus, you’d rather feed them with the text yourself.

Solution: add a meta description tag to your pages, and make sure it is unique to the page (which will benefit your search engine display). No need to stuff keywords into your meta description because it will turn of Facebook users and it doesn’t help your search engine ranking (though limited keyword use can benefit from bolded SERPs).

Troubleshooting Facebook Snippet Displays
So you’ve got a meta description already in place, but you are wondering why the heck yours isn’t working. Here’s an example:

Google shows my meta description just fine:

But Facebook shows this:

Turns out Facebook is hypersensitive as to how your display your meta tag. In my case, my meta description was written like this:

Notice the capital “D” on description? Search engines don’t care, but Facebook does. Change it to lower case and it will work fine.

Solution: use

This will ensure proper Facebook snippets (casin on mEta or cONtent make no difference to Facebook). After making the fix, it may take Facebook some time to recognize the new meta tag if it pulled it recently.

Facebook Links Display Title
The link display name, or title, uses the title tag of your page (same as the search engines). There is no case senstivity here so this should rarely be a problem for you. Sometimes Facebook has trouble pulling titles and descriptions, but it is more a matter of their fetching mechanism, because it usually works – try again if you do end up with something weird.

Control over Thumbnails in Facebook Links
Another frustration might be the images available in Facebook for thumbnails. The good news is you do have some control. You can add this tag to your pages if you want to provide a default image:

You can also specify the medium type:

Valid values for medium_type are “audio”, “image”, “video”, “news”, “blog” and “mult”.

Since Facebook has such a high user-base, other services, like Digg have adopted the same policies for summaries, thumnails, and mediums.

Pubcon is always a great conference and tends to attract more practitioners then some of the other major search conferences, which is something I highly value. I’ll be speaking at Pubcon next week on UGC SEO (optimizing user-generated content to drive large volumes of natural search traffic). Surprisingly, this is my first time speaking at Pubcon and I’ll get to do it with the conference founder, Brett Tabke on the final day of presentations.

Besides the conference sessions, there’s tons of great parties. This year I plan to attend DK’s Poker Tourney and the SEOMoz 3rd Annual Search Spam/Werewolf party (went to the first, but missed it last year).

The Poker Tourney isn’t a charity event this year, but the intentions are still the same. This year Purpose Inc has asked that attendees post one of their favorite charities to a blog post. I’ve decided to mention Kiva, which is a non-profit that enables you to lend money to entrepreneurs in 3rd world countries to allow them to get themselves out of poverty. You get to choose who you lend to by reading their profiles and what the money will go towards, then they pay you back so you can lend to another in need.

Hoe to see you in Vegas!

Twitter search seems fairly basic, which often leads to people using 3rd party Twitter tools for searching. Most people don’t realize it, but Twitter some handy search command abilities:

Basic Twitter Search Commands (no surprises here):

• Multi-word queries: if you search multiple words, Twitter’s default search will search tweets containing both (or all words).
  Example: big doggy would find tweets that contain both “big” and “doggy”, but not necessarily the words paired together.
• Exact match queries: if you use quotes, you can limit tweet searches to exact matches.
  Example: “big doggy” would find tweets that contain the exact phrase “big doggy”.
• OR queries: if you are looking for two related or interchangable words, OR queries work well.
  Example: dog OR doggy would find tweets that contain either words.
• Hash Tag queries: Hash tags used to be one of the only methods of putting a stamp on your tweet to help those searching in Twitter, but they not as critical these days as Twitter search has improved. Regardless, people still use hash tags (#), especially when attending events or joining in on a meme
  Example: #ff would find tweets that contain #ff (which stands for Follow Friday).
• At queries: when referencing someone on Twitter, you use @ (at reply), so it makes sense you can search for people doing so.
  Example: @webconnoisseur would find tweets reference me.
• Question queries: target tweets that ask a question.
  Example: web designer ? would most likely find tweets of people looking for web designers.

Advanced Twitter Search Commands:

• Combining queries: You can combine queries to really nail down what you are looking for.
  Example: “seattle startup” OR “seattle start-up” OR “@seattle20″ combines the simple search commands listed above and would be an excellent way to find tweets related to startups in Seattle.
• From and To queries: You can actually target tweets that are specifically sent to or from someone.
  Example: “from:GregBoser” “to:Graywolf” would show me tweets Greg Boser sent to Michael Gray. If you perform a query like this, Twitter will also include a link that will allow you to see the entire conversation, if there is one.
• Exclude queries: You can specify words you don’t want to see in your query.
  Example: hello -kitty would show me hello tweets, but exclude tweets that are reffering to hello kitty or someone saying hello to their kitty on twitter (trust me, you want to stay away from these people).
• Location queries: You can actually limit tweets by location.
  Example: beer near:Seattle within:15mi would show me beer tweets written within 15 miles of Seattle
  
  Note: it isn’t entirely accurate as it appears to go off the location the person has listed in their profile, which isn’t always where they are at the time.
• Date-based queries: You can actually limit tweets by date, both before (use “since:”) or after (use “until:”).
  Example: techcrunch since:2009-09-12 until:2009-09-13 would show me tweets about TechCrunch over the weekend on September 12th or 13th
• Attitudinal queries: Some Twitter users incorporate happy or sad faces into their tweets. You can search these to find attitudes about topics.
  Example: cloudy with a chance of meatballs :) would show me people who were happy to go see or enjoyed the movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
• Source queries: probably one of the least useful queries unless you want to research a 3rd party tool’s adoption, you can do query searches by tweet software source.
  Example: LOL source:tweetdeck would show me LOL tweets that came from someone using tweedeck.
• Link filtered queries: a great way to track down referenced links, this query will limit Twitter searches to tweets that contain links.
  Example: mashable filter:links would show me people’s tweets linking to Mashable articles.
• Jumping forward in older searches if you are hunting for something via Twitter search and want to save yourself from clicking “older” over and over, you can change the page number (after your first older click) in the Twitter URL to jump forward.
  Example: http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=3984008800&page=2&q=fight&rpp=20 is the result I get after searching fight in search.twitter.com and clicking on older once. To jump further back in time and skip a bunch of tweets, I can go up to the browser URL box and change the page=2 portion to page=35 to jump straight to page 35.

Hope you find these Twitter search commands useful. If you know of others, or would like to share your example uses, please leave a comment.

Just over a month ago, I was shocked when I was force-fed a twitter screen takeover while looking at my domain names registered at GoDaddy. Immediately, I did some news searches to see if GoDaddy had purchased Twitter because it seemed very out of place. There were no such announcements. In fact, there was very little news about this development.

Every time I’m in my account tweaking my domains, I can’t help but notice the twitter promotion overload. I can’t help but wonder why GoDaddy would take such a keen interest in helping to fuel more twitter accounts. From a service perspective, it is pretty lame because it is already incredibly easy to check name availability and sign up for twitter. I could think of a hundred other features GoDaddy should build and promote instead. If it were a two-way arrangement, where Twitter promotes domain registration for Twitter user names, then I could see the benefit.

So why do you suppose GoDaddy is pimping Twitter so much? Is GoDaddy going to buy Twitter? Is Twitter paying GoDaddy for this treatment? Is GoDaddy’s product development team overly caught up with Twitter & group-think led them to believe this add on would separate them from other registrars? I have no idea, but it will be interesting to watch this over time.

Here are more screenshots showing how much GoDaddy is pimping out Twitter within their domain dashboards:

If you think about it, LinkedIn is a natural beneficiary from massive layoffs. Upon being laid off, here are some user activities LinkedIn might not see otherwise:

• Status updates to let others know about layoff
• Recommendation requests to co-workers
• Recommendations for co-workers
• Profile updates and employment history updates
• Status updates about job seeking
• LinkedIn personal network job searches
• Contact info lookups to find names & phone numbers to fill out unemployment benefits job search logs
• Network inbox emails to ask for help with employment

Outside the unemployment-related activities I list above, there are, of course, many other activities that you might see even in healthy job markets like looking up potential bosses, researching organizations, growing network, Q&A activity, etc.

LINKEDIN UNEMPLOYMENT CORRELATIONS
The numbers don’t lie: LinkedIn certainly benefits from this increase in activity and the activity is well-documented. In terms of pageviews, LinkedIn went from 272 million pageviews in March ‘08 to 872 million pageviews in March ‘09 (252% growth according to Compete.com data).

Not only does an increase of unemployment catapult activity (as measured by pageviews), it also greatly benefits reach (as measured by uniques). Check the graph below that I created that shows LinkedIn uniques visitor growth and the unemployment rate for the past two years: